Pansy Napangardi

Market Analysis

Paintings by Pansy Napangardi made their earliest appearance at auction in 1989, the year Gabrielle Pizzi staged her first solo exhibition in her eponymous Melbourne gallery.

No less than 11 paintings had appeared in the secondary market without distinction before Sotheby’s offered a 122 x 122 cm work entitled Watersnake Dreaming at Pikilli (Vaughan Springs), 1989, in its June 1995 Contemporary and Aboriginal Art Sale. The painting sold for $3680.

In June 1997, two works sold at Phillips auctions for $3,740 and $3,630 respectively, and six months later Leonard Joel set a new record with Kunga Kutjara Dreaming, which sold for $7,425 (Still the artist’s 5th highest price on public record).

The artist’s current record price was established in 2005 when Lawson~Menzies sold Pililli, c.1995 for $10,800 and a further 12 works have achieved prices greater than $5000. Even so, with a success rate of 63% and 80 works finding new homes out of the 127 offered for sale, so many works have gone for such low prices that her average result at auction is just $2,534.

Pansy rarely painted for Papunya Tula after the 1980s and managed her own career thereafter with the help of her European husband. For this reason Sotheby’s, have offered only 6 works by this artist since 1990. Bonhams and Christies have handled even fewer.

Though Pansy Napangardi has been an important ‘town’ artist and the winner of the National Aboriginal Art Award in 1989, she is known to have had only 3 solo exhibitions, and these were held at the genesis of her career between 1989 and 1991. Though her works are distinctive and she is strong in the literature, the prices of her works have never hit the stellar heights of several of her contemporaries and are unlikely to do so in the future unless something exceptional is unearthed.

Profile

Born in Haasts Bluff c.1940 to a Luritja mother and a Warlpiri father, Pansy Napangardi was for a long time the leading female artist of Papunya Tula.

Long before the international art world embraced Emily Kngwarreye, Pansy Napangardi was growing up in Papunya, watching the desert art founders as they painted. A totally unaffected, extremely pretty young woman, she became the first professional female desert painter amongst the Luritja and Warlpiri, much like Linda Syddick Napaltjarri was to the Pintupi. As soon as she was married and about a decade before Papunya started supplying women artists with their own painting supplies, Pansy moved to Alice Springs. She sold her work independently until the mid 1980s, when she returned to Papunya. In 1989, she won the National Aboriginal Art Award and a solo exhibition at the Sydney Opera House followed the same year. Another followed with Gabrielle Pizzi Gallery in Melbourne.

Pansy’s reputation flowered at the very moment that the attributes of personal style and expressive ability had become highly prized by collectors. Unfettered by convention, she developed a technique of applying multi-coloured dots by dipping the point of her painting stick directly onto the meniscus of a range of complementary colours. She became the most prominent female artist at Papunya Tula from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, but later reverted to practising as an independent artist for a range of private dealers.

Her sister, Eunice Napangardi, is a renowned Aboriginal artist, her youngest brother Brogas Tjapangati paints for Papunya Tula and her sister, Alice Napangardi, was first married to Kaapa Tjampitjinpa and later his younger brother and fellow artist Dinny Nolan. Pansy Napangardi is a unique artist, whose work deals with her traditional beliefs and cultural heritage in a truly original style.